I personally have beef with the judge system over at OCR. It used to be my favorite place for music period, now it's a bunch of egomaniacs seeing who pirated the most libraries, completely detracting from the original work in ways that do not fit. And the judges eat the shit up like a fat clown's asshole shits shit. For the past 2 years or so, the site has been in a decline of musicality to an uprising of production value-based ethics. I can honestly say I haven't enjoyed a single remix from the site in over 2 years. I LOVE LOVE LOVE some of them, but I've noticed none of them were made after the year 2007. MOST of them are around 2002-2005 era.
The judges seem to be lightly educated in music theory, and try to show it off waaayyyyyyy too much. You can TELL they only know so much, and that ceiling is a low one. Tons of remixes, completely going against the common idea of a repeating theme/melody, are now present on OCR. They completely mutilate the melody, which should be the key link to the original piece. I say melody because the harmony is not such a prevalent part when it comes to video game music, most people have favorite songs from video games because of the catchy repeating melody/theme phrase. I haven't really seen much virtuosity coming from 3/4ths of the community over at OCR as of late. Why not tear up the melody in to something new? As long as you follow the rules of theme variations, it's all good.
Something tells me the artists that have been contributing to the site in the past couple years have read less than 1000 pages of boox on theory and composition, for any genre(orchestral, jazz,blues), lack formal musical instruction if they HAVEN'T read X amount of boox........try to put in as much instruments as possible, sometimes I see mixes where there will be like 30 instruments, 20 of them only having a handful of notes out of the whole song......Overall the scene went to cruddy and amateurish. That is not to say there is NOTHING good over there anymore. You can find some good artists on OCR, some REALLY FUCKING AMAZING artists, the kind that are easily professional level musicians. But 75% of them are quite amateur.
It's not about that 240 gb library you just DL'd on btmon.com. It's not about that FL STUDIO XXL PRODUCER EDITON UBER SYNTH PACK you just torrented. It's about your interpretation of the theme of the original work, and what YOU as an ARTIST can do with it. Remixes should be like this:
In 'Who's Line is it Anyway', there is a bit where the first person starts off with a topic they are given, they will say a few lines, and it goes to the next guy and they just go from there. Well the composer has a theme laid out for the entire game, a motive/leitmotif/whathaveyou. And in a particular song, he modifies that theme into the particular melody of said song, trying to establish a sound that complements the scene it plays in. You, as the remixer, need to provide your own take on this melody, perhaps by trying to fit it in as if the song were played in another scene, or perhaps slightly altering the mood of the melody to give off a certain emotion/feeling that's not quite present in the original, or emphasizing an already-present mood.
Here is what I have been seeing at OCR:
Take random song that's been done 1000X already. Get as much synths going as possible, with the most cliched and overdone settings on said synths. Make sure it does NOT fit with or complement or slightly alter the mood of the original instrument said synth is to replace. Make that synth DESTROY the original instrument, have it FUCK the intent of the original instrument, disregard the original instrument, don't even attempt to using a similar style to the original instrument(why are you using a staccato saw wave on a legato violin? that might be suited if the original instrument were some sort of horn, but a treble clef string?). Please learn the ins and outs of both the original instrument, and the synth you are using, otherwise it's like a 10 year old who hears a song and tries to play it on his 50 dollar squier using only one string. You aren't using the capabilities of the synths, you are annihilating the purpose of the original piece, all in the name of generic teknoe pop that will get you some high fives from your fellow 'artists'.
Very few on OCR are what I would call 'musicians'. How many uebermensche of musik do you guys know that aren't complete walking encyclopedias in at least ONE instrument? Most are masters in composition in umpteen instruments, and the specialists that tend to stick with a particular group of instruments(or even just one like guitarists), are complete Einstein's in technique, theory, every aspect of their instrument. It feels like OCR is any bozo with a pirated fruity loops and a midi of [insert game song here]. Few are the artists at OCR, those days are long gone.
If not already kristallklar, I'd just like to clarify that I'm not dissing everyone at OCR, just 75 percent of it. The system as a whole is flawed, and as neo-fusion stated earlier, newgrounds.com is the epitome, it's what OCR should model itself after. The judges need to spend about 100 hours or so brushing up on music theory, lingo, and history. Have they even heard of 12 tone system or serialism? Hint: those 2 are the same thing. Something tells me if some bozo on OCR DID study serialism, they'd get the jist of it and feel they have all they need to know, and try to incorporate it into the maggiore-minore that 99 percent of game music uses, failing utterly and without respect to what the composer was going for. Anytime someone tries to completely change the song into something the composer didn't have in mind for the song, such as the FF6 orchestra album that Uematsu said went the polar opposite of what he was conveying with his originals, it tends to go to shit, 99.9 percent of the time. I remember seeing a billboard once that said "God votes pro-life". Really? You must have a pretty big dick if you can speak for God. So what makes your musical dik so big you can completely detract from ever aspect of the original, with only a shitty synth rehash of the melody as your encompassing feature that you believe gives you the excuse to call it a 'remix' or a 'piece of music' or god forbid 'art'.
I've got just over 10,000 pages in boox in .pdf format I'd be willing to share with the OCR community. If OCR were a country, and I were a dictator, I'd go in, shutdown their government for a year, and not let them continue til they have read all that, and then read at least 2 hours worth of synth programming tutorials.
Topix include:
orchestral composing
composing in general
forms
theme and melody
harmony
contrapuntal techniques and the various species thereof
serialism
jazz
blues
arranging from genre X to genre Y
And again, it's not everyone over there, there are some AMAZING ppl at OCR still. But it's gone the way of youtube, any dumbass with a laptop mic(pirated fruity loops) can record himself doing stupid shit(making shitty synth redubs of vgm). If that's too negative so be it, but the masses are uneducated, and the mass of OCR is musically stupid, and that just doesn't work.
